Technology will have a huge impact on us all, but Britain’s new generation of leaders look back to grammar schools and railway nationalisation despite the convulsions ahead

“If you had to choose any time in the course of human history to be alive, you’d choose this one.” So says Barack Obama in the editorial that opens the “Frontiers issue” of Wired magazine he has just guest-edited. On the face of it, it’s a sentence so banal that it barely merits comment. But set against the backward-facing mindset currently defining so much of politics – from the rise and fall of Donald Trump to the mess of crabby nostalgia that drove a lot of the vote for Brexit – his words seem defiant.

These stalwarts of the classroom help parents who are struggling and children who are falling behind. In some English schools they now face pay cuts of 25%. Do they think they can win?

At the gate of Lakeside primary school on the south-eastern edge of Derby, a mini-drama is afoot. It’s 8 o’clock on a Thursday morning, and a small group – most of them women – are forming a picket line, while others hand out leaflets to parents.

Some mums and dads quietly bemoan the fact that the school will close at midday and that they have had to make childcare arrangements. But many are loudly supportive. One man, Mark Stacey, announces that, rather than cross the line, he is taking his two kids home.

People power, not politicians, led the fight against intolerance in the 1970s. We need that grassroots spirit again

To quote those legendary Englishmen the Beatles, it was 20 years ago today (or thereabouts). In autumn 1996, the Tory-run Department of National Heritage issued a press release featuring the term “Cool Britannia”. Tony Blair and the prime movers of New Labour were already on that political wavelength. In his conference speech the previous year, Blair had said that he aspired to make Britain “a young country … with a common purpose, ideals we cherish and live up to … ready for the day’s challenge: ambitious, idealistic, united”. By the following year, a new Labour government was working on nothing less than “the rebranding of Britain”. Now, ruinously, we have been rebranded again.